To answer this question, it’s firstly important to establish that there is a difference. Web design is the art (and science!) of building a website. On the surface, a web designer is someone who makes a pretty website by arranging blocks of text, images, and other elements into an attractive and eye-catching design that will inspire a site visitor to take a closer look at the product, service or information being offered. Delve deeper however, and you’ll see that web design is highly technical and includes the use of some complicated-sounding programming languages. Speak PHP, Ajax, BASH, AWK, TCL or Python, anyone? Graphic design on the other hand was traditionally a print-based profession, and the design process still generally begins with pen-and paper sketches. Nowadays, the internet and computer software such as Adobe Illustrator now go hand in hand with the job. Graphic designers create logos and corporate identities, and design packaging, advertising, letter heads, brochures and more. They work with typography – not only the traditional black and white, or Pantone 2 to 3 color logos, but increasingly these days, full color logos incorporating gradients, transparency, 3D shadows and more edgy effects. A graphic designer may provide the artistic and aesthetic talent towards creating the look and feel of a website, and mock up where on the page the different design elements should go, but the web designer is the responsible for converting this mock up by splitting the graphics into images, polishing the design with software such as Adobe Photoshop, and then using web coding to translate the design onto the screen. Since the global recession, design companies have been increasingly looking for multi-skilled jacks-of-all-trades who can perform the role of both graphic and web designer, thus cutting costs and getting two skills for the price of one.

Pixmac stock photos is the “Pink Picture Market”. One of the fastest growing royalty free stock photography and image agencies in the world began their microstock industry revolution in September 2008.

In less than 2 years, Pixmac has assembled a vast image collection of more than 10 million pictures, representing Fotolia, Dreamstime, Celebrity Images, and the Pixmac collection all from one site. The largest collection of legally licensed stock photos anywhere!

Pixmac invented the "One Stop Shopping" experience for image buyers. This is the ability to find and purchase the perfect image instantly in a matter of seconds without the need to register first.

The LogoBee design team knows that free stuff is hard to find and quality free stuff even harder! After 10 years in the business, we wish to fix that problem by sharing our logo design savvy by offering these high-quality free logos for you to download.

Each logo design was created by our talented designers using Adobe Illustrator. They are provided free of charge for you to download in scalable vector format (Adobe Illustrator CS3). Click the picture of a logo to download it. Each logo includes a brief description of what we think it would be better used for, but the possibilities are endless!

You are welcome to use these logos for your business or for personal use, but we have to ask you not to distribute them without permission.

Starting An E-Commerce Business: Baby Steps Starting your own e-commerce business can be quite the adventure. There is nothing wrong with falling head over heels in love with your ideas and plans and becoming overly excited. But always remember, feet first. Creating a business from scratch is like a child learning to walk. You need to grab on to something solid, feel around, get a sense of balance, and take baby steps. Risky Business Before running full speed ahead with your brilliant business brainchild, proper planning is required. Being an entrepreneur is risky business, however you can improve your chances of success with preparation and development.Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that one of the hardest things to get right in web design is creating proper layout and navigation. Sometimes a web site will be very rich in content, except that traffic will suffer due to poor navigational structure. In other words, navigation has become one of the key ingredients in developing sustainable, long-term traffic to your site. Your site tree: Often before you even get into the graphical aspects of your site, it is useful to think about the content that you will have for your site and brainstorm possible navigational schemes, otherwise known as site trees. These trees describe the way in which your site branches out into articles, products and services, and any other additional sections you may have. You would be surprised how different tree layouts can be created, but not all are created equal. Read the rest of this entry »

Internet search engines exist to organize the seemingly immeasurable amount of information available on the web. They direct people to pages that are relevant to their searches, pages that discuss the exact keywords they are looking for. For businesses that receive the majority of their clientele from search engines, search engine rankings can make or break their business. Search Engines Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing technique that enhances a website and its content in order to increase the chances of achieving a high rank the search engine result pages (SERPs). Search engines are very secretive about their criteria and ranking systems as they continuously update and revise their algorithms (mathematical formulas used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results), and therefore there is less likelihood of webmasters and search engine optimizers being able to achieve higher rankings by manipulation and spamming. Every search engine has its own formula and criteria for indexing and ranking pages. One can analyze SERPs and backward links (all the links pointing at a particular web page) and attempt to determine a search engine's indexing criteria, however there's a lot of risk involved in relying on a limited number of optimization techniques. Because of the unpredictable nature of search engines, websites can easily move from a top ranking position on a SERP down to the third or fourth SERP or even be banned from the search engine altogether.

LogoBee logo design has recently taken it upon itself to start the cleanup of the OSCMax Shopping Cart Suite. This project was intended to accommodate web developers and programmers in general. The final version has been released in the hopes that the web community, and LogoBee clients, will benefit from their best efforts. OSCMax is a derivative of osCommerce which is the world’s most used Shopping Cart. It comes with a lot of extra functionality pre-installed, while osCommerce requires you to install them manually. Many articles have been written on the fact that this open-source solution is not W3C compliant and that it would be a large job to resolve this. These articles point out that a full cleanup to bring the code up to speed with the W3C compliancy expectations would be quite complicated. LogoBee logo design has done their best to make the OSCMax Shopping Cart Suite code W3C compliant. The code was quite extensive and the clean up was a time consuming process; but LogoBee is proud to release the results of their best efforts. Now website developers and programmers from the global web community will be able to benefit from their hard work with the new OSCMax shopping cart suite which can be found on LogoBee.com. The final version produced by the LogoBee team has been released and the web community is encouraged to try it out. This final version of the OSCMax Shopping Cart Suite can be found on the LogoBee website at this location: http://www.logobee-web.com/demo/oscmax/.

W3C Compliancy refers to the programming standards that have been established by the W3C Authority; which is the group responsible for maintaining and evolving the HTML language. Open Source Solutions are pre-programmed solutions that can be customized on both an aesthetic and functional level by experienced programmers. These solutions generally cover most of the business needs of clients; which is what makes them extremely popular as Online Business Solutions for clients not willing to invest large amounts of capital in Custom Developed (Programmed) Solutions. Since the W3C released its new level of standardization and Validation Tools it has become far easier for clients to see how their website complies with the standards established by the W3C. The one issue Read the rest of this entry »